Development of an Innovative Degraded Adhesion Model for Railway Multibody Applications

In this work the authors present a contact model comprising a new adhesion model that takes into account some of the main phenomena characterising the degraded adhesion, such as large sliding at the contact interface, high energy dissipation, the consequent cleaning effect on the contact surfaces and the final adhesion recovery due to the removal of external unknown contaminants, a phenomenon caused by the high energy dissipation on the contact surfaces and by the consequent cleaning effect due to the friction forces. Besides, since most of the physical characteristics of the contaminants are totally unknown in practice, the followed approach will have to minimize the number of hardly measurable physical quantities required by the model.